iMac 12,2 (mid 2011) airport (wireless) problem

hey kricki,

brought my new imac 27" back to the apple store for three days,

they said everything works fine, they have absolutly no airport connectionproblems..

there router was 25 m away from my imac, no walls inbetween..

I got my wlan over fritzbox router from my neighbours, so i thought it could be the distance...

i asked my neighbours to turn off the option to use 300 MBit channels and it did the trick to me too..

no more Airport disconnect-connect Sport

Thanks

had the same problem with connecting st with ethernet but most with airport. Thought first my router was broken. Brought my new 27" iMac back to the dealer. Now I have a new motherboard in my iMac.

This afternoon I got my iMac back from the Apple store after taking it in with this problem. They replaced the airport wireless card but it is still doing the same thing. Getting very annoyed now, I have other Apple devices in the same spot and they have no wireless issues.

Tomorrow I will be back in the Apple store getting a replacement computer or a refund!

Latest on this from me:

Still having dropouts intermittently - have noticed it now when attempting to stream to my Xbox. Airport shows that I am connected to the network, but if you click on the icon it keeps coming up with "Looking for networks" roughly every 20 seconds. I can't connect to my Xbox, and web page loading is temperamental.

I'm utterly sick of having this problem now - I just can't believe that a machine costing £1,500 can't even properly connect to the internet. The fact that Apple have buried their heads in the sands about this and given us nothing to go on, apart from a few "geniuses" saying "Hmm, worked for us!" is just unacceptable.

I can't find a UK support email address, and Apple aren't even on twitter. The best they can offer is for me to call them (on an 0845 number, after having paid extra for Applecare!) which is obviously inconvenient.

It's going back to the shop, and I'm going back to a PC. I guess it's a case of "Better the devil you know..."

Ring the store number and press option 2.. 02071539000 (AppleCare)

I had an argument about the issue with them... obviously not taking responsibility for it. but after 3 days of troubleshooting over the phone I was advised to take my iMac to the store, had tests run, no hardware fault.. I had just restored my iMac so to eliminate software as a fault but it still dropped connection in store. After nearly 2 month's and 3 iMacs later I am now getting a refund. What a poor experience it's been! Oh and my bluetooth still drops out and oh my screen flickers when the brightness is down.

So long iMac!

FWIW, upgrading to Lion fixed the issue with my iMac always losing the wireless network connection after waking from sleep and it requiring a restart to get it back. It's been working just fine for the last 2+ weeks now.

I also had the same problem but after countless phone calls and trying many things I no longer have the issues. What we did was the following and maybe worth trying if nothing else has worked for you. I am by no means an expert and some shortcuts may not be exactly right.

1. Backed up stuff on time machine

2. Erase the disc entirely in Disk Utility by selecting erase and thenusing the 2nd option under the Advanced tab which is the one where you zero all the disk out.

3. Once that has been done, restart your machine.

4. When the chime sounds, please Command, Option R all at once and boot into the recovery drive.

5. Under utilities, select reinstall Mac OSX.

6. Once it has reinstalled, you can then go and bring back documents etc from time machine.

7. I reinstalled all 3rd party software rather than time machine and have had no problems since.

One important thing is not just to reinstall the OSX as that didnt work, it only worked once I erased the disk completely

Disappointing it didn't work properly out of the box but now seems to work fine.

Hope it helps someone..

I just spoke to Apple support who said I have 90 days free support since upgrading to lion.

I told him I had done a new location, changed the wireless channel, done a ping which eventually dropped out, tried nearly all the fixes/workarounds mentioned on these forums.

He told me to do the following:

1. Unplug all cables from the iMac, including the power, for 10seconds, and then plug them back in.

2. He then made me locate the Cmd, Alt, R and P keys and told me that I shoudl turn on the iMac and immediately hold down these keys and keep them held down until the iMac had made the 'power-on' chiming sound three (3) times in a row.

3. Then release the keys and let the iMac start up as per normal.

I did this.

The first difference is that I am able to turn off the wireless, then turn it on, and it will reconnect to the router. My iMac has NEVER done this before. It would never be able to even find, let alone reconnect to the router once I turned the wifi off and back on. So this was an exciting development. I tried it a few times - wifi off, on, off, on - and each time it reconnected to the router without any problem.

Then I put the iMac to sleep and woke it up. It reconnected to the router fine. Now the test is to leave the iMac alone for an hour or two and see if it is still connected when I come back to it - THIS WILL BE THE REAL TEST AS PREVIOUSLY IT ALWAYS DISCONNECTS WHEN I LEAVE IT ALONE FOR A WHILE AND THE ONLY WAY I CAN RECONNECT TO THE ROUTER IS TO REBOOT.

I will keep you posted but I am quite excited at the moment as I have had this problem for the last three years (and it got a lot worse since I upgraded to lion).

Cheers!

Sadly the 'Cmd+Alt+R+P for three restarts' did not actually fix the problem. Even though for the first few hours it initially appeared to stop the wifi from disconnecting randomly, if I leave the iMac on overnight, when i try to use the internet in the morning it doesn't work. The wifi says it is connected but safari says there is no connection (and no other net traffic works). When this occurs:

1) if I click on the wifi icon, it says 'looking for networks' but it doesn't findany available networks (whereas usually I have more than 10 available) and

2) if I turn off the wifi I cannot then try to turn it back on it does not turn back on.

Once again, the only way to get the wifi connected again is to reboot the mac.

System info says my wifi is Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.131.36.11)

I will get back on the phone to Apple support and keep troubleshooting and keep you updated.

Ive just installed 10.7.1 which includes "improvements to wifi connectivity" I'll report back if i see any more drops after todays update.

If it turns out that only Lion 10.7.1 fixes the issue then I am going to ask for a free copy of Lion.

I'd assume that there will be an update for Snow Leopard as well.

Everything is working fine so far on my end. Won't say it's fixed yet, but no dropping connections like it used to do.

Did the upgrade to 10.7.1 and stil having issues... Already had to turn wireless off and on 3 times since upgrading.

Just an update from my end. Apple were happy to replace my 2 month old iMac for a new one, but after a few hours it was having the same problem dropping connection.

However, I managed to acquire one of the updated wireless extreme base stations the other day, and since using this for Wi-Fi I have not had a single problem.

When I was at the genius bar I was told that interference related to LCD screens was sometimes a problem on the Wi-Fi frequency, which may explain why the Airport Extreme solved the problem (simultaneously broadcasts on both 2.4Ghz & 5Ghz).

Shame it isn't techincally an actual fix, but it has made my computing experience far less stressfull.

I updated to 10.7.1 tonight. After a few hours, the wi-fi signal resumed its regular dropping.

I have not done anything to my router or computer to fix this. I believe it is an inherent problem with the hardware or software and I'm waiting for a fix to be issued by Apple. If I lose patience, I will print this discussion thread and take it to the Apple Genius with my computer (after calling AppleCare). In the meantime, I use Network Diagnostic to reconnect - it's faster than turning wi-fi off/on.

When I move my iMac 27" closer to my TimeCapsule, the signal dropping disappears entirely. Since the latest Airport Extreme strengthen the singal, I presume that the iMac is not good at dealing with a weak signal -- although my signal is always at 4 bars in the usual location of the iMac.